Indigenous and Jewish worlds of trauma -- "Humanitarian feelings...crystallized in formulae of international law" : biological determinism and the problem of perpetrator intent -- "Metaphysical Jew hatred" and the "metaphysics of Indian-hating" : public memory and the problem of imperial power -- "We are waiting for the construction of our museum" : indigenous people, Jews, and the North Americanization of the Holocaust -- "The shrines of the soul of a nation" : traumatic memory, assimilation, and vanishing in North America -- "A permanent statement of our values" : indigenous genocide, the Holocaust, and European public memory -- "The void has made itself apparent as such" : placing group memory in public history.
Summary:
"Remembering Histories of Trauma compares and links Native American, First Nation and Jewish histories of, and approaches to, traumatic memory. Using source material from both sides of the Atlantic, it examines the differences between these people's ancestral experiences of genocide and the representation of those histories in public sites in the United States, Canada and Europe. Challenging the ways public bodies have used those histories to frame the cultural and political identity of regions, states, and nations, it considers and compares the effects of those representations on internal group memory, external public memory and cultural assimilation. Offering new ways to understand the Native-Jewish encounter, and providing a unique framework to forge their relationship between shared critiques of public historical representation, Mailer seeks to transcend historical tensions between Native American studies and Holocaust studies. In linking and comparing European and American contexts of historical trauma and their representation in public memory, this book brings Native American studies, Jewish studies, early American history, Holocaust studies, and museum studies into conversation with each other. In revealing similarities in the public representation of Indigenous genocide and the Holocaust it offers common ground for Jewish and Indigenous histories and provides a new framework to better understand the divergence between traumatic histories and the ways they are memorialized"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.